💡 That task the top model could definitely handle, except the per-task price never worked out. Most of us have shelved one or two of those.
What has kept frontier models out of production is usually not their capability but their price. Writing code as an agent, reading through long documents, driving a computer — all of it burns tokens, and knowing the best model would solve it doesn't help when the unit cost blocks the rollout.
GPT-6.1 Sol, just announced by OpenAI, answers that wall by making the same capability cheaper rather than by pushing capability higher. Against the top-end GPT-6 Astra, it matches the score on DeepSWE v1.1 for coding at one-fifth the cost, and on OSWorld 2.0 for computer use it closes the gap to 2.1 points while costing one-seventh. Its hallucination rate improves from 4.5% to 4.1%, near Astra's 4.0%. API pricing is $2 per million input tokens and $10 output, with cached input at $0.10 — a 95% discount off standard input.
The shift shows up not in tasks that only the top model could solve, but in the ones shelved purely over cost. On Terminal-Bench Science 0.1, what runs $23.80 per task on Astra costs $5.47 here. Workloads parked for failing the math come straight back onto the table, and for agents rereading the same context every turn, that cached-input price compounds the effect.
Astra still has its place where the last few points genuinely matter. For now, routing by task difficulty and unit cost looks like the practical design.
Title: Introducing GPT-6.1 Sol
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